This time of the semester is quite interesting and extremely stressful for all business school students. I won’t lie — we have had tons of fun running around, enjoying all of our “social” time with friends and classmates. But now we are down to the grind.

We are in our last week of classes for the school year, and finals are less than a week away. Just last night, I was up until 3 am finishing a paper, then I went right back to campus at 8:30 to work on a group project.

The entire week before finals will be like this: nonstop. Not only are we finishing up homework assignments, group projects and starting to (well, trying to) study for finals, we are also all in the midst of writing a huge research paper for the Global Leadership Program (GLP).

The GLP is a 10-day international trip that all first-year MBAs experience. It is a pretty amazing addition to the Cox program.

The GLP is a 10-day international trip that all first-year MBAs experience. This is truly the “capstone” to the first year of business school, and it is a pretty amazing addition to the Cox MBA program. There has actually been a required class this entire Mod, and it has been completely devoted to preparing us for the trip.

We have been learning about the economies, politics, challenges and success stories of each country we will visit. As much as we would have loved to catch a few more hours of sleep on Thursday mornings, it really has been a great time to study up on the places that we will be departing to on May 5.

There are four GLP trips offered each year, and each student in the first-year class is assigned (based on their preference) to one of the four destinations. The options differ slightly from year to year, but we have trips to Tokyo and Shanghai (that’s where I’m headed), Seoul and Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Santiago, and London and Bratislava.

From what I hear, the trips are amazing and lots of fun. But they are also jam-packed with visits to some of the largest international companies in the world, as well as sightseeing ventures around each city. We will have a few days to get out and explore by ourselves, but the goal is to get to know each country, what its culture is like and how business is handled there.

We couldn’t be more excited to get through finals and hop on the planes to our chosen destinations. I will be writing a post from Asia in a few weeks, so be on the lookout for first-hand stories about our trip — with pictures, of course.

In the meantime, enjoy a few pics from my second-year classmates on their GLP adventures last year.